In `Good` Taste Or `bad,` You Are What You Buy

Pantheon, 237 pages, $24 My taste shows who I am. It is an outward portrayal of my self-image. It tells much about me-much that I want to say about myself, and much that I don`t even know I`m saying.

I am what I buy.

That is the secret meaning of things, according to the British design critic Stephen Bayley.

``Taste might evade absolute definition,`` Bayley writes, ``but we are known by our momentary expressions of choice. . . . Taste is about consumption and, in consuming, we reveal ourselves.``

I have to admit that I had a difficult time with Bayley`s book, ``Taste:

The Secret Meaning of Things.`` My preference is for clear, get-to-the-point, black-and-white writing. It lets me know where I stand. It, so to speak, suits my taste.

Bayley, on the other hand, likes to muse. He pecks at his subject in a

(to me) maddeningly roundabout way, with frequent digressions, and digressions from digressions. Many of these are for the purpose of skewering some (to Bayley) errant tastemaker of the past.

He writes, for example, of William Morris, the influential 19th Century English designer, craftsman and poet:

``Morris`s art was adolescent, but it had great power. With its gaudy eroticism, long-haired girls, constipated prose, bardic refrains, vegetarian colours, clumsy details and murky sensibilities he provided his narrow public with an irresistible mixture of sex and nostaligia, made safe by historical reference.``

Still, despite all of Bayley`s twists and turns, I was able to grab onto some seemingly solid ideas, such as his contention that there is no ``good taste`` or ``bad taste,`` at least not in the way people think of them, as absolutes.

roast chicken and duck with Chateau Lafite; followed by sponge cake, wine jelly, ice-cream, macaroons and strawberries with Sauterne, Champagne, Cognac and Chartreuse.``

Yum? Neither meal seems very appetizing to me. And that seems to be Bayley`s point.

``The suggestion that the infinite variety and vast sweep of the mind should be limited by some polite mechanism of `good form` is absurd, he writes.

``Everyone has taste. ... If good taste means anything, it is pleasing your peers; bad taste is offending them.``

Nevertheless, all taste isn`t equal. Taste may not be good or bad, but it can be more richly pleasurable or less so, according to Bayley.

``Taste,`` he asserts, ``is not a particular set of values, but the ability to discriminate between things in order to enhance enjoyment of them. Thus, taste depends on knowledge and the exercise of it, presupposes an appetite for aesthetic pleasure.``